Windows Azure is committed to openness across the entire application stack, with service APIs and service management APIs exposed as RESTful endpoints that can be used from any language or runtime, key services such as Caching, Service Bus, and Identity that can be hosted either on-premises or in the cloud, and open source SDKs for popular languages that give developers a choice of tools for building cloud-based applications and services.

In this blog post I’ll recap some of the most important news of the last year in each of these areas. As I mentioned in a blog postearlier this year, when a journey reaches an important milestone it’s good to look back and think about the road so far. We’ve come even farther down that road now, and here are many technical examples of what has been accomplished.

Data Portability

When customers create data in an on-premises application, they have a high level of confidence that they have control over the data stored in the on-premise environment. Customers should have a comparable level of control over their data when they are using cloud platforms. Here are some examples of how Windows Azure supports Data Portability:

Cloud platforms should reuse existing and commonly used standards when it makes sense to do so. If existing standards are not sufficient, new standards may be created. Here are some of the ways we’re working to support standards for cloud computing:

Cloud platforms should provide a secure migration path that preserves existing investments and enable co-existence between on-premise software and cloud services. Here are some examples of ease of migration and deployment on Windows Azure:

Cloud platforms should enable developer choice in tools, languages and runtimes to facilitate the development of interoperable customer solutions. This approach will also broaden the community of developers that write for a given cloud platform and therefore enhance the quality of services that the platform will offer to customers. Here are some of the ways that Windows Azure is delivering on developer choice:

It’s exciting to see how far we’ve come, and we still have much to do as well. The Interoperability Elements of a Cloud Platform originally came out of discussions with customers, partners, and developers about what they need from an interoperable cloud, and we’re continuing those discussions going forward, and we will continue to deliver on these important elements!